Five Ways Cloud Computing Strengthens IT

Much of the focus on cloud computing to date revolves around the ways in which cloud computing delivers significant administrative and operational benefits. After all, the more dynamic, autonomic capabilities promised by cloud could go a long way in relieving some of the burden in managing large, complex IT infrastructure operations. Sometimes lost in the cloud computing benefits discussion is how cloud computing enhances development and test groups in an enterprise. I can think of five different ways in which cloud computing strengthens development and test groups:

1) Self-service capability: A defining characteristic of cloud computing solutions is a self-service capability that allows users to commission and decommission computing resources as appropriate. In development and test shops, this means users can directly procure the resources they need to complete their tasks without going through lengthy, manually-driven procurement chains. This results in a significantly shortened procurement period, and it means developers and testers can quickly get to the task at hand.

2) Resource availability: Resource sprawl within IT shops, a very common occurrence, leads to resource deficiencies that are sometimes a problem for enterprise developers and testers. Tasks like testing massive configurations and performing intensive load tests become increasingly difficult as it is hard to harness enough resources to get the job done. Cloud computing, through intelligent virtualization, usage tracking, and more, enables this scattered resource pool to be viewed and utilized as a single logical entity. Resources can be doled out as needed, and intense tasks become achievable without extensive setup or procurement periods.

3) Environmental fidelity: From the time a software application or service leaves a developer’s hands to the time it reaches production, quite a few things about its environment may be changed, often times unbeknownst to the developer. The test and operation teams may have different conventions and configurations than development teams, and this can lead to unintended application behavior and delays in service delivery. Cloud computing offers a potential solution to this problem in the form of the increasingly popular templatized solution stack. These solution stacks are pre-built, ready to deploy configurations, which include the application and entire environment down to the operating system. This stack can be captured as some sort of image (i.e. OVF image, Amazon Machine Image, etc.), and passed off between each team along the delivery cycle. Teams downstream from development see the exact environment in which the application was designed and unit tested, and they can balance needed changes to that environment against a known, working solution.

4) Hosted tools: Though possibly not yet standard operating procedure, one can look at the wave of SaaS offerings and make a reasonable assumption that more and more development and test tools will be moving in that direction as well. Why not? Putting aside the technical challenges of hosting something like a code editor on a network, the benefits of centrally hosting these types of tools are clear. Developers and testers no longer have to worry with installing, configuring, running, or maintaining these enabling tools on their own machines. Instead, they can log into the tools from any machine with a network connection and get work done.

5) Increased focus: This benefit is a culmination of all of the above benefits. By easing the process to acquire resources, making more resources available, ensuring configuration integrity, and removing the burden of maintaining tools, developers and testers are left to focus on their core jobs. The operational and administrative portions of their job are significantly reduced through cloud computing solutions. As a result, organizations are in a position to benefit from more developer innovation, increased test quality and coverage, and more.

The above five ideas illustrate that cloud computing does indeed enhance development and test efforts just as they boost administrative and operational tasks. Development and test teams that understand the benefits they can derive from cloud computing are likely to be proactive in advocating its use. For the cloud computing industry, increasing adoption by development and test groups could lead to widespread grassroots movements that further spread the use of cloud computing throughout enterprises.

Dustin Amrhein joined IBM as a member of the development team for WebSphere Application Server. While in that position, he worked on the development of Web services infrastructure and Web services programming models. In his current role, Dustin is a technical specialist for cloud, mobile, and data grid technology in IBM's WebSphere portfolio. He blogs at http://dustinamrhein.ulitzer.com. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/damrhein.